Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, the platform of European retailers, is going to assess fire and electrical safety and structural integrity of 200 more factories. The Accord will hire engineering firms to inspect the additional factories that have been included on the list after completing the initial inspections in 1,106 factories in September, it said. The factories have been included as the Accord signatories started business with them after the period, an Accord official told New Age on Tuesday. After the Rana Plaza building collapse on April 24, 2013 that killed more than 1,100 people, mostly garment workers, Western retailers and apparel brands, reacting to public outrage, began a major push to improve safety in the Bangladeshi factories liked with their business. The EU brands and retailers including H&M, Carrefour and Mango, as well as 14 American companies formed the Accord and the initiative started inspection since February last year that ended in September 2014. The Accord had identified more than 80,000 faults in its 1,106 inspected units and over 11,000 issues have so far been remediated. Accord chief safety inspector Brad Loewen told New Age that all of the factories which the Accord inspected were involved in direct business with Accord signatories. Replying to a question he said, ‘The Accord has always used third party inspectors to do the initial inspections with the Accord staff engineers doing all of the follow up inspections to verify that all findings are remediated.’ Another Accord official said the appointment of third party inspection farms would be completed shortly and the inspections in the additional units would start soon.
